I'm trying to get a new installation going on a DL380 G4 with the HP 6i disk controller. Everything built according to plan with gentoo-sources-3.7.9 and Grub2 installed without dramas.
I used the latest LiveCD, and the cciss driver is being used for the controller.

The entries in fstab are correct, the supported file systems are included in the kernel, as are all the drivers (as far as I can tell) for the HP 6i controller.

The (104,4) tells me that the system can see the controller, but that's as far as I can get. I've tried changing all the references of cciss to sda just in case the driver's doing some renaming, but that doesn't change anything.

Not sure if "104" is correct or not... I'm just used to seeing single digits in other installations.

Can anyone shed light on what's going on?

Last edited by NotExcessive on Sun Feb 24, 2013 12:04 pm; edited 1 time in total

not knowing heaps about that specific setup (or, well, not having touched HP raid since like '07), i can offer one suggestion that may prove useful - make a tiny initramfs that does nothing more than launch a busybox shell

my thinking, basically, is if you have an initramfs that drops you to a busybox shell, you can see what /dev looks like after the kernel loads, then sorta step through piece by piece and see what's missing
when you have things sorted, nuke that initrd reference from grub2.cfg and carry on. Basically a tiny initramfs for the sole purpose of troubleshooting - though if youre doing this all over SSH that could be a PITA, and, disregard

your assertions thus far make perfect sense, and though ages ago i remember similar hurdles, so, that would be my own next step if i ran into such a thing.

Cracked it. You're not going to believe this (on the other hand, you will), but changing the boot entry in Grub from root=/dev/cciss/c0d0p4 to root=/dev/cciss!c0d0p4 solved everything. This is what drove me nuts: the labeling has always been /dev/cciss/c0d0 and somewhere along the line, the driver's calling it /dev/cciss!c0d0 instead! No wonder I couldn't find the bloody thing.

The version of gentoo-sources I used for this machine is 3.7.9. With the DL360G4p I built recently, the version was 3.6.11. I can only surmise somebody changed something along the way.

Thank you NotExcessive. I had the same issue with kernel 3.7.9 and a P400 controller. The root device needed to be changed from root=/dev/cciss/c0d0p3 to root=/dev/cciss!c0d0p3 in the grub config file.